23. It is child’s play to list a century of official hoaxes . . . Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MA, 2004.
24. These include not just the usual run of . . . Paul Lewis, ‘Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media’, Guardian, 23 February 2011.
25. For example, the satirical claim that the US would . . . Nicky Woolf, ‘As fake news takes over Facebook feeds, many are taking satire as fact’, Guardian, 17 November 2016.
26. The Toronto Sun’s false story . . . Ishmael N. Daro, ‘A Fake Online Review Claimed Refugees “Slaughtered Goats” In a Hotel. This Newspaper Helped it Go Viral’, BuzzFeed News, 11 October 2018.
27. The baser truth is that Facebook profited . . . Judd Legum, ‘Facebook’s pledge to eliminate misinformation is itself fake news’, Guardian, 20 July 2018.
28. In 2017, Facebook launched a ‘war on fake news’ . . . Dave Lee, ‘Facebook’s fake news crisis deepens’, BBC News, 15 November 2016; ‘Facebook fake news: Zuckerberg details plans to combat problem’, BBC News, 19 November 2016; Mark Molloy, ‘Facebook just made it harder for you to share fake news’, Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2017.
29. Zuckerberg admitted that the problem was . . . ‘Facebook publishes fake news ads in UK papers’, BBC News, 8 May 2017.
30. Subsequently, following Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress . . . John Hegeman, ‘Facing Facts: Facebook’s Fight Against Misinformation’, Facebook Newsroom, 23 May 2018.
31. Hardly anyone is susceptible to ‘fact-checking’ . . . Aniko Hannak, Drew Margolin, Brian Keegan and Ingmar Weber, ‘Get Back! You Don’t Know Me Like That: The Social Mediation of Fact Checking Interventions in Twitter Conversations’, Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2014; see also Alice E. Marwick, ‘Why Do People Share Fake News? A Sociotechnical Model of Media Effects’, Georgetown Law Technology Review, 424, July 2018.
32. For the philosopher Steve Fuller . . . Steve Fuller, Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game, Anthem Press: London, 2018, p. 1.
33. Michiko Kakutani, the esteemed journalist . . . Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth, William Collins: London, 2018, p. 40.
34. This reflects the spontaneous ideology of professionals . . . Matt Huber, ‘The Politics of Truth/Facts’, Medium, 25 January 2017.
35. Indeed, the New York Times has reported . . . David Adler, ‘Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists’, New York Times, 23 May 2018.
36. The journalist Peter Pomerantsev . . . Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Daniel Dennett: “I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics”’, Observer, 12 February 2017; Peter Pomerantsev, ‘The rise of the postmodern politician’, BBC Newsnight, 16 March 2017.
37. The theory that postmodernism has promoted . . . Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2018, pp. 200–45; Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, Penguin Random House: London, 2017, pp. 89–110; C. G. Prado, America’s Post-Truth Phenomenon: When Feelings and Opinions Trump Facts and Evidence, Praeger: London, 2018, pp. 5, 9, 21–2 and 110.
38. For example, Kakutani cites without apparent irony a preening comment . . . Alan Jay Levinovitz, ‘It’s Not All Relative’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 March 2017.
39. For British journalist Matthew D’Ancona . . . D’Ancona, Post Truth, p. 91.
40. According to philosopher Lee McIntyre . . . McIntyre, Post-Truth, p. 202.
41. For Kakutani . . . Kakutani, The Death of Truth, p. 56.
42. So is the motif of ‘construction’ . . . Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 41.
43. As Karl Rove put it, ‘we create our own reality’. Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004.
44. The sacked National Security Council officer Rich Higgins . . . Jeet Heer, ‘Trump’s Racism and the Myth of “Cultural Marxism”’, New Republic, 15 August 2017.
45. The anti-Trump conservative Australian television news anchor . . . Jason Wilson, ‘Chris Uhlmann should mind his language on “cultural Marxism”’, Guardian, 22 February 2016.
46. Their ‘Enlightenment’ is . . . Dan Hind, The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim it, Verso: London and New York, 2008.
47. Now a similar rhetorical move . . . Kakutani, The Death of Truth, p. 45.
48. In surprise bestsellers . . . David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Arris Books: Devon, 2004; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, War on Truth: Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press: Ithaca, NY, 2005; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, The Overlook Press: London, 2006.
49. As Emma Jane and Chris Fleming’s analysis . . . Emma A. Jane and Chris Fleming, Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid, Bloomsbury: New York and London, 2014 pp. 4–5. Devorah Baum notices a similar pattern. Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone), Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2017, pp. 53–5.
50. In a survey of 1,500 scientists . . . Monya Baker, ‘1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility’, Nature, 25 May 2016. On the replication crisis, see Nature’s special online report, ‘Challenges in irreproducible research’, Nature, 18 October 2018.
51. According to the historian of ideas Philip Mirowski . . . Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2011.
52. Among the worst examples of this degradation . . . C. G. Begley and L. M. Ellis, ‘Raise standards for preclinical cancer research’, Nature, 483, 2012, pp. 531–3; C. G. Begley, ‘Reproducibility: Six red flags for suspect work’, Nature, 497, 2013, pp. 433–4.
53. The industry is riddled with . . . Ben Goldacre, ‘Foreword’, Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix it Fourth Estate: London, 2013.
54. When a peer-reviewed survey of scientists . . . Daniele Fanelli, ‘How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data’, PLOS One, 29 May 2009.
55. Data was hailed as . . . ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data’, the Economist, 6 May 2017; Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, ‘Big Data: The Management Revolution’, Harvard Business Review, October 2012.
56. In an excitable piece for Wired . . . Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete’, Wired, 23 June 2008.
57. The bonus of big data is . . . Carlo Ratti and Dirk Helbing, ‘The Hidden Danger of Big Data’, in Dirk Helbing, ed., Towards Digital Enlightenment: Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution, Springer: New York, 2019, p. 22.
58. In 1948, 125 million telephone conversations . . . James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Pantheon Books, New York: 2011, p. 13.
59. Already by 2003, more data had been . . . Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2015, Kindle loc. 83.
60. By 2016, 90 per cent of the entire . . . Bernard Marr, ‘How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read’, Forbes, 21 May 2018.
61. In the same year, Google was . . . ‘There are over 3.5 billion searches per day on Google alone’, PRWeb, 20 December 2017.
62. Google’s estimates overstated . . . Tim Harford, ‘Big data: are we making a big mistake?’, Financial Times, 28 March 2014.
63. The volume of data is not . . . H. V. Jagadish, ‘Big Data and Science’, Big Data Research, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2015, pp. 49–52.
64. Capitalism encounters . . . David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1989, pp. 284–307.
65. The development of information technologies . . . ‘Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed’, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909.
66. By 2008, the average American consumed . . . Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload, Kindle loc. 83.
67. When engineer Claude Shannon declared . . . Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, pp. 251–9.
68. Moreover, this production is taking place in a . . . Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1994.
69. What seems like a device . . . Ian Hamilton, ‘Jaron Lanier Explains What Could Make VR “A Device Of Nightmares”’, Upload (www.uploadvr.com), 8 June 2018.
70. For example, the BBC alleges . . . Joel Gunter and Olga Robinson, ‘Sergei Skripal and the Russian disinformation game’, BBC News, 9 September 2018.
71. In 2016, a team of researchers published . . . Michelle Drouin, Daniel Miller, Shaun M. J. Wehle and Elisa Hernandez, ‘Why do people lie online? “Because everyone lies on the internet”’, Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 64, November 2016, pp. 126–33.
72. Averse to public ownership and regulation . . . Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Internet Revolution: From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism, Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam, 2015.
73. Milan Kundera, reflecting on Stalinist tyranny, argued . . . Quoted in John Forrester, Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1997, p. 81.
74. This, the ‘sour grapes’ theory of communications . . . Evgeny Morozov, ‘Moral panic over fake news hides the real enemy – the digital giants’, Guardian, 8 January 2017.
CHAPTER SIX
1. In the moment of his supposed triumph . . . ‘Finsbury Park: Man “wanted to kill Muslims in van attack”’, BBC News, 22 January 2018; Lizzie Dearden, ‘Finsbury Park attack trial: Darren Osborne was “smiling” after running over Muslims with van, court hears’, Independent, 24 January 2018; Vikram Dodd, ‘How London mosque attacker became a terrorist in three weeks’, Guardian, 1 February 2018; Lizzie Dearden, ‘Darren Osborne: How Finsbury Park terror attacker became “obsessed” with Muslims in less than a month’, Independent, 2 February 2018; Nico Hines, ‘Neighbor of Terror Suspect Darren Osborne: “He’s Always Been a Complete C**t”’, Daily Beast, 19 June 2017.
2. He wouldn’t even know who . . . ‘London Muslim attack suspect Darren Osborne: Pub fights and anti-Muslim rants’, Agence France-Presse, 20 June 2017.
3. The psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni once remarked . . . ‘[I]t is only necessary to remember how often the negro figures in the dreams of Europeans who have quite probably never even seen a negro’, Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, Methuen & Co. Ltd: London, 1956, p. 19.
4. In cyberspace, the great ‘consensual hallucination’ . . . William Gibson, Neuromancer, Berkley Publishing Group: New York, 1989, p. 128.
5. Throughout the early 1990s, far-right, Holocaust-denying groups . . . Les Back, Michael Keith and John Solomos, ‘Technology, Race and Neo-fascism in a Digital Age: The New Modalities of Racist Culture’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 30, 1996, pp. 3–27.
6. This is despite the fact that . . . Tara McKelvey, ‘Father and Son Team on Hate Site’, USA Today, 16 July 2001; David Schwab Abel, ‘The Racist Next Door’, New York Times, 19 April 1998; ‘World’s oldest neo-Nazi website Stormfront shut down’, Associated Press, 29 August 2017; Eric Saslow, ‘The White Flight of Derek Black’, Washington Post, 15 October 2016.
7. Journalist Paul Lewis and academic Zeynep Tufekci have . . . Paul Lewis, ‘“Fiction is outperforming reality”: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth’, Guardian, 2 February 2018; Zeynep Tufekci, ‘YouTube, the Great Radicalizer’, New York Times, 10 March 2018.
8. Part of the answer is . . . Guillaume Chaslot, ‘YouTube’s A.I. was divisive in the US presidential election’, Medium, 27 November 2016.
9. Zeynep Tufekci argues . . . Zeynep Tufekci, ‘YouTube, the Great Radicalizer’, New York Times, 10 March 2018.
10. Nowadays all you have to do is . . . John Naughton, ‘Extremism pays. That’s why Silicon Valley isn’t shutting it down’, Guardian, 18 March 2018.
11. As former Google engineer Guillaume Chaslot put it . . . Paul Lewis, ‘“Fiction is outperforming reality”: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth’, Guardian, 2 February 2018.
12. The artist James Bridle has written . . . James Bridle, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium, 6 November 2017.
13. . . . it reflected data coming from . . . Tracy McVeigh, ‘Amazon acts to halt sales of “Keep Calm and Rape” T-shirts’, Guardian, 2 March 2013; Colin Lecher, ‘“Keep Calm And Rape”, Plus 5 More Awful/Offensive/Hilarious Algorithm-Created Shirts’, Popular Science, 6 March 2013.
14. And platform behaviour obeys . . . Jeffrey S. Juris, ‘Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 39, No. 2, May 2012, pp. 259–79.
15. Alice Marwick, an academic and former Microsoft researcher . . . Alice Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2013.
16. This is one of the things that cultural critic Jonathan Beller is getting at . . . Jonathan Beller, The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital, Pluto Press: London, 2018, p. 1.
17. The ‘if . . . then’ logic of algorithms . . . Taina Bucher, If . . . Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics, Oxford University Press: New York, 2018.
18. As the political scientist Colin Crouch defines it . . . Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2004.
19. And, as the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta once put it . . . Errico Malatesta, The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, AK Press: Chico, CA, 2014, p. 488.
20. The first mass market created by print . . . Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2017, p. 641.
21. It helped create, as Justin Joque put it . . . Justin Joque, Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2018, Kindle loc. 2941.
22. This is the context in which, Devorah Baum argues . . . Devorah Baum, Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone), Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2017, p. 97.
23. She milked the last dismal vestiges . . . Hillary Clinton, ‘Secretary Clinton Speaks on Internet Freedom’, US Department of State, 22 January 2010 www.youtube.com. Brand’s full statement was: ‘On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.’ See ‘“Information Wants to be Free”: The history of that quote’, Digitopoly (www.digitopoly.org) 25 October 2015.
24. The wave of monopolization taking place . . . Michael Corcoran, ‘Democracy in Peril: Twenty Years of Media Consolidation Under the Telecommunications Act’, Truthout (www.truthout.org), 11 February 2016.
25. It was easy for the State Department to lobby Twitter . . . Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, Penguin: New York, 2013, p. 327.
26. The Justice Department demanded access. . . Kevin Poulsen, ‘Prosecutors Defend Probe of WikiLeaks-related Twitter Accounts’, Wired, 8 April 2011.
27. The security state’s ancient dream had been . . . David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, Penguin Random House: New York, 2018, pp. 227–8.
28. Twitter fought the Justice Department on its demands . . . Kevin Poulsen, ‘Judge Rules Feds Can Have WikiLeaks Associates’ Twitter Data’, Wired, 10 November 2011; ‘You Don’t Sacrifice Your Privacy Rig
hts When You Use Twitter’, ACLU, 6 March 2013.
29. FBI director James Comey complained that Apple . . . Sanger, The Perfect Weapon, p. 227.
30. He said that such secretive, counter-security measures . . . ‘ Mark Zuckerberg “confused and frustrated” by US spying’, BBC News, 14 March 2014.
31. And yet, as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon pointed out . . . See also Heidegger on the broken hammer: only when technology breaks down are we forced to reflect on the network of purposes to which it belongs. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2017.
32. Facebook’s already much larger user base had increased . . . ‘Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2018 (in millions)’, Statista, 2019; ‘Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 3rd quarter 2018 (in millions)’, Statista, 2019.
33. Most social industry users, still a minority . . . Peter Beaumont, ‘The truth about Twitter, Facebook and the uprisings in the Arab world’, Guardian, 25 February 2011.
34. The infamous Facebook experiment, published in 2014 . . . Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory and Jeffrey T. Hancock, ‘Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks’, PNAS, 111 (24), 2014, pp. 8788–8790.
35. In Tahrir Square, a coalition of Islamists, liberals and Nasserists had built . . . Atef Shahat Said, ‘The Tahrir Effect: History, Space, and Protest in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011’, University of Michigan, 2014.
36. The reduced costs of organizing also reduced the costs of quitting . . . Thomas Rid, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Oxford University Press: New York, 2013, p. 28.
37. And, as Paolo Gerbaudo’s analysis in his book . . . Paolo Gerbaudo, The Digital Party, Pluto Press: London, 2019, pp. 25–6.
38. On Ask.fm, another recruiter answered questions about . . . Laurie Segall, ‘ISIS recruiting tactics: Apple pie and video games’, CNN, 30 September 2014; Wendy Andhika Prajuli, ‘On social media, ISIS uses fantastical propaganda to recruit members’, The Conversation (www.theconversation.com), 4 December 2017.
The Twittering Machine Page 27
